Editorial: There's no future in appeasement of GOP's Obamacare rejectionists

Sep. 30, 2013

The Capitol in Washington, Monday, Sept. 30, 2013, as the government teeters on the brink of a partial shutdown at midnight unless Congress can reach an agreement on funding. Hours before a threatened government shutdown, the Senate has the next move Monday on must-do budget legislation that has fueled a bitter congressional dispute over President Barack Obama's signature health care law. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite) (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite) / AP

Written by

the Detroit Free Press Editorial Board

It is this simple: Republicans in the U.S. House, including all nine tea-drunk GOP members of Michigan’s congressional delegation, would rather shut down the federal government than permit 14 million uninsured Americans to obtain health care coverage Jan. 1.

Four southeast Michigan Republicans — Rep. Kerry Bentivolio, Rep. Candice Miller, Rep. Mike Rogers and Rep. Tim Walberg — were among those who conditioned their support for a resolution to continue government funding after midnight tonight on an agreement to postpone the scheduled implementation of the Affordable Care Act, a law adopted by both houses of Congress and signed into law by President Barack Obama more than three years ago.

The Republicans’ negotiating position is based on two fundamentally contradictory tenets: 1) that the ACA is a “train wreck” deeply unpopular with the American people and 2) that allowing the law to go forward now will make it impossible to repeal or amend it later.

Clearly one of these suppositions must be false. If the new health care law is as unworkable and unpopular as House Republicans insist, it is only a matter of time until voters elect a Senate and president equally determined to dismantle it. It will survive the next federal election cycle only if GOP warnings turn out to be exaggerated, and a majority of Americans conclude that the new health care landscape is an improvement over the status quo.

That is precisely what happened, not coincidentally, when Social Security and Medicare were adopted over the objections of similarly hysterical ideological critics. A cynical person might conclude that what House Republicans fear most is not that Obamacare will fail to deliver on its champions’ promises of universal, more cost-efficient care, but that it will succeed.

But as responsible opponents of Obamacare like U.S. Rep. Charlie Dent, R-Pa., and U.S. Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, have observed, even principled objections to health care reform cannot justify a dereliction of the House’s fundamental responsibility to govern. Holding the entire federal government hostage — or, what is even more irresponsible, threatening to undermine the full faith and credit of the United States by withholding congressional authority to pay previously authorized expenditures — takes the House dangerously close to the ends-justify-the-means logic of fanatic zealots.

There is little doubt that the straightforward budget resolution adopted by the U.S. Senate would prevail in a straight up-or-down vote in the House, if only Republican Speaker John Boehner will permit it. As of Monday afternoon, however, it remained uncertain whether Boehner would permit his chamber’s bipartisan sanity caucus to do its work.

That a minority of messianic Republicans are willing to persevere, even at the cost of their party’s own destruction, is clear. “Like 9/11, ‘let’s roll,’ ” said one of their number, Rep. John Culbertson of Texas, explicitly linking the rejectionists’ actions with those of the heroic Americans who 12 years ago overpowered the hijackers of United Flight 93 .

But Culbertson has it backward. It is he and his fellow ideologues who are gleefully piloting the government toward a crash landing. And it is the sanity caucus — the grown-ups in both parties who take seriously their oath of office — that must regain control of the cockpit.